Clockjack Oven - restaurant review

Last year was indisputably the year of the burger in London, with a stampede of openings in the wake of dirty-food trendsetter Meat Liquor. It was only a matter of time before humbler chicken dishes were similarly reinvented as post-ironic comfort food for the capital’s hipsters.

Thus last autumn saw the advent of Mark Hix’s Tramshed in Shoreditch (roast chicken), Soho House’s Chicken Shop in Kentish Town (hipper, rotisserie chicken) and Wishbone in Brixton (fried chicken, backed by Meat Liquor co-owner Scott Collins). So when, so to speak, does chicken jump the shark?

Clockjack Oven’s owners will hope that isn’t soon: this restaurant tucked behind Piccadilly Circus is reportedly the first of a chain of 15 to be opened within the M25 over the next five years. In the meantime, Clockjack Oven aims to place itself well above Nando’s in the, er, pecking order.

The mostly long, wooden tables, tiling and lowish lighting have more the feel of a wine bar than a chicken joint (though the wine list is both short and grim). Meanwhile, a row of seats at the bar face the restaurant’s raison d’être: a vertical rotisserie oven, the first of its kind in the UK, in which chickens sit speared upright, rotating in front of the flames (a clock jack is the US term for a meat spit driven by springs or weights, a Tudor invention).

The chicken is the point here. Indeed there are few other choices on the menu, bar a few main-course-sized chicken salads and chicken sandwiches. Your decision is more how much to order — from three pieces (£6.95) to a whole chicken (£17.95), cut up French style so that everyone gets a bit of breast.

It is certainly very good roast chicken — free-range Breton birds, roasted both moist and crispy: we made short work of the platter before us, and of the superior double-cooked chips. But salads were uninspiring and the sauces that accompany the chicken — ranch, BBQ, chilli, caesar — gloopy.

Service was friendly and cheerful, even from staff who have to wear T-shirts emblazoned “Undress me” (back: “Dress me” — presumably a feeble sauce-related pun.) Not very cool, though I doubt anybody will notice in Brent Cross or Epsom by the time Clockjack Oven reaches such post-post-ironic environs. And by then it won’t matter either that chicken joints are no longer hip, the fine line between grungy food for cool people and greasy food for poor people having faded away, like a mockney accent in well-heeled middle age.

14 Denman St, W1 (020 7287 5111) Mon-Thurs noon-11pm, Fri-Sat noon-12am, Sun noon-6pm. A two-course meal for two with beer and service, about £50.